With the advent of wired and wireless communication networks (i.e., Internet), online computer gaining has become increasingly popular with many people. Online services may allow for video game players to play against other players from all over the world. With such a large pool of potential players, there is a correspondingly large range of player abilities, ranging from the first-time or occasional player to the daily, devoted fan and even on to the ranks of professional video game players.
Some organized competitions, such as tournaments, may attempt to match players of equal skill. These online multi-player tournaments have typically been in a “Bracket” or tree diagram or Ladder format which has limited availability consisting of the top players or teams. Because of this, many people who may wish to participate opt not to as these players may not qualify or may feel that they are not “good enough” to participate. Further, these online multi-player tournaments generally only award the winning players or teams. Some consolation prizes may be awarded. However, the vast majority of players generally have no realistic chance of winning any prize. As one can imagine, the really large global tournaments, under the present system, provide the average player with a very small opportunity of success. In fact, the most lucrative market, currently, is the Massively Multiplayer Online game tournament or MMO. These MMO tournaments attract huge gamer interest, but also presently provide little opportunity for the average player to be rewarded. Additionally, the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game tournaments (MMORPG) require huge amounts of computer attention, time and storage space. There is no presently known computer system, including hardware and software capable of handling the statistics required and thus, the vast majority of players are left without proper customer service, creating a significant issue in the industry.
Fantasy sports have also been of particularly growing interest. A fantasy sport is a game wherein participants act as team owner. The object is to build a team of players that competes against other fantasy owners based on the statistics generated by the real-life individual players or teams of a professional sport (e.g. football). There is no presently known computer system, including hardware and software that is capable of taking multiple statistics and metrics of various online video games for a single player (or group of players) that may be used to track and report that player's (or group's) overall performance across all games for use in a large-scale fantasy game. This long-felt need for such a computer system has also been present since the inception of online video games and fantasy sports.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a new system and method that overcome the above issues. The new system and method should, preferably, be open to the massive public audiences (MMO) with rewards being presented to the majority of participants and at the same time rewarding the few outstanding players with progressive jackpots as well as other rewards systems. What is also needed to overcome existing issues is the computing ability to handle the massive amount of statistics, for example, present in an MMORPG. The new system and method should also, preferably, be capable of taking and distributing player statistics and metrics that represent player overall performance across multiple online video games for use in a large-scale fantasy game.